This has several advantages, two of the most obvious being instantaneous anywhere access (Like Yahoo Mail) and backup of documents.

Technically any website is “in the cloud” but I assume you want something like Google sites, Where you design the site and it sits on Google’s servers, with a minimum of effort. If you just want to access (or share) a document from anywhere, use google docs. The links are in Google’s “more” section.

2 Responses to “What Is Cloud Computing? How Can I Utilize Cloud Computing if I Want to Establish a Website?”

Cloud computing is a new technology which essentially utilizes the power of a cluster of servers to power a website by dynamically scaling and virtualizing resources such as processing power, memory, storage among others.

Each server in the cluster can be thought of as hosting the website – if this is ambiguous to comprehend, then think of it as if your website resides on a super high powered server which never breaks down because this super high powered server actually is a combination of several servers working together.

In reality, your website resides on the cluster which in turn comprises of load-balanced servers that simultaneously answer to the call of transmitting the website to the requester, and are responsible for server-side processing such as executing PHP/ASP/Perl scripts, retrieving and appending to databases etc.

The diametrically opposite solution is dedicated hosting – where your website sits on a dedicated server, and if that dedicated server breaks down or is unable to handle the increase in user requests and traffic, then your website goes down.

Cloud computing is the way to go over dedicated hosting, and if you want to get started, you should plan at least $ 100/month for your hosting needs – you basically pay for how much traffic you get and how much server resources you use

The answer varies with your computing needs. If you need to run a virtual machine in the cloud, then cloud computing is what Amazon offers with EC2. If you just need to use a particular service, then Google Apps would fulfill your cloud computing needs. Finally, depending on what Microsoft eventually offers, Azure would be an answer as to what cloud computing is.